Mini-game multiplayer party meets arena battler in Marooners, out on PS4 today

We’ve come a long way since Marooners started life as a Global Game Jam project in the Netherlands. Who would have thought it would one day be on the PlayStation 4? Well it’s happening today!

Me and my brother Mike have always enjoyed the experience of fast, funny and furious local multiplayer gameplay and that feeling is exactly what we wanted to capture with Marooners – and the PS4 is the perfect platform for it.

The constantly changing mini-games and how you win

Your goal is simple: grab as much treasures as you can, and definitely make sure to get more than your friends. The challenge is that the game changes constantly – we have 25 different mini-games and arenas, and you could find yourself in any one of them at any moment.

One moment you’re chasing coins on a lake of lily pads, and then with a flash (no loading screen) you’re running downhill dodging boulders – there’s no warning so be ready for a switch at any moment… The state of each mini-game is tracked between switches, so when you switch back to the lily pad lake, everyone’s characters will be in the same places as before, along with treasure and threats!

Multiplayer: fight friends or bots either locally, online, or at the same time!

But what about that age old problem of getting enough friends together in one place? We solved that by allowing combined local and online play – so if you’ve got six friends all together that’s great, but otherwise you can play with whoever you have to hand on your local machine, while hopping online to join games with other people. And what if you hate other people? No worries! We’ve got full bot support for in solo and multiplayer games, and they’ve been carefully programmed not to rage quit if you beat them too bad.

Characters and melee weapons to suit every taste

One of the most fun parts of developing the game has been creating the weapons and characters. It’s boring to play as space marines and soldiers all the time, so we made sure to include pirates, Vikings, cave men, deep sea divers, eskimos and more!

Then we came up with weapon ideas… so many weapon ideas. Sure you’ve got your swords and spears and clubs, but more terrifying are weapons like the toilet brush, the umbrella, and the dreaded broccoli anomaly. If all this wasn’t enough, we also let you pick the colour of your character and weapon!

Stages that’ll kill you even if your opponents don’t

Once we had all those characters and weapons, it was time to make things interesting. Luckily, the natural world has a plethora of ways to kill people, often in really pretty ways. Volcanoes, for instance. Everyone loves lava until they fall in – or they’re pushed.

Deep lakes covered with semi-solid lily pads offer a scenic location to chase treasure, while ice… ice has it all. It looks great in the right lighting, it’s slippery which leads to hilarious accidents, and it can break when you’re standing on it. Yep, we love ice.

For variety we also turned to classic human inventions like the giant rolling boulder, unstable platforms built in high places, dangerous underground tunnels, huge stompy things, rickety bridges, and more. It’s tough to pick a favourite, but it probably has to be the boulders. We liked them so much that often we don’t even limit it to one – we’d fill the screen with boulders if it wouldn’t make the game impossible.